Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Ernesto is fine by me. Mr. Lemke would be my father.

As I mentioned on two other threads, around these parts there's little to go by as far as I'm aware. Having said that, I haven't really looked into the CMA apart from training a couple of times with a friend who studies baghua (sp?) and taichi. The experience I took from that was that I was better at grounding his stuff, floating him in turn and maintain my structure during freestyle grappling. But he would be the last person to claim to be an authority of any kind so this says as much about him as it does about me. Again, I'm just starting out on IT, maybe training 'seriously' about a year and a half.

If you don't mind me asking, when you started getting out and about, at what time in your personal learning process where you able to discern what was IS and what wasn't. Or did you happen to already know IS prior to outside exposure? Was there some defining point or pointers you could share that would be helpful for those like myself who have to rely mostly on self study?

Evidently, please don't feel obligated to answer. I'm asking this mainly because I used to do the seminar route but after affiliating with my current teacher, anything else pailed in comparison. That is, anything else within the aikido community.
The pitfall I perceive with the suggestion of doing the rounds is that as a beginner without 'loyalty' (not me) to some tradition/school/style etc. one could end up as a bastardized stylist since there is no foundation with which to compare the input with. So maybe one ought to have some basic level of experience in order to be better able to differentiate the IS/IT/IP from the other stuff.